Sometimes in life you have to stop and admit that you have been wrong about something. I used to be a Democrat so I’ve had to do that many times. It hasn’t always been easy. However, there have been exceptions. Looking back, I can honestly say that changing positions was never easier than when I finally renounced my support for Planned Parenthood.
As an atheist college student, I supported Planned Parenthood wholeheartedly. In graduate school, I had a serious girlfriend who was an atheist and a feminist. We supported so-called abortion rights because we needed a back-up plan in case the pill failed us. We supported Planned Parenthood because we honestly thought they were doing things to prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place.
Later on, I realized that people in the abortion industry had sold me a lie. A thorough examination of an ultrasound film of an abortion procedure showed me that the target of that procedure was not a clump of cells. It was a distinct living and whole human being – one that could often feel the pain of the procedure.
Honestly, I didn’t even need to know that the baby felt pain in order to know that an abortion was an unjustifiable homicide – any more than I would justify killing a man in his sleep because he could not feel it. Seeing clearly identifiable hands and feet were enough for me. It was technology, not religion, which caused me to turn against the so-called “woman’s” right to choose.
Initially, my decision to turn against abortion did not add up to a decision to turn against Planned Parenthood. Around the time I became pro-life I honestly thought that abortion referrals were a small fraction of what Planned Parenthood did. Then, around 2002, I started writing about the campus culture wars. Because they were usually the only “women’s health” organization allowed to affiliate with campus women’s resource centers, I started to carefully watch the activities of Planned Parenthood. I wondered why these women’s centers tried so hard to keep college women away from crisis pregnancy centers opting to send them to Planned Parenthood instead. In the years that followed, here are some things I observed:
*Around 2004, I noticed that Planned Parenthood sold “I had an abortion” tee shirts. In college, I had been taught that the organization sought to prevent abortions. But there they were selling tee shirts to women who previously had abortions with the expressed intention of helping them celebrate the abortion experience. What possible motive could they have for actually promoting abortion while simultaneously boasting that they were doing things to prevent it?
*Pictures began to surface showing Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger speaking at Klan rallies. I later learned that these pictures were forged. However, seeing them caused me to investigate the claims behind them, specifically that Sanger was a racist and eugenicist. Such claims are undeniably true. There are numerous quotes, which establish that Sanger had an ugly racist and classist agenda. In her own autobiography, Sanger actually admits to speaking at a Klan rally in 1926 after which she claimed, “a dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”
*Black abortion rates. In graduate school, I was taught that the criminal justice system was “institutionally racist” because one-third of the men in prison are black, despite the fact that blacks are only one-eighth of the population. Later, I learned that more than one-third (about 37%) of the babies who are aborted are black, despite the fact that blacks are only one-eighth of the population. Why is this not institutional racism? And why is there a Planned Parenthood office in almost every poor black neighborhood in America. Was this wholly unrelated to the views Sanger expressed when she spoke at Klan rallies?
*Covering up statutory rape to facilitate abortion. Lila Rose is an American hero. In a series of undercover videos, she revealed that Planned Parenthood employees were willing to help under-aged women who claimed to have been statutorily raped and impregnated get abortions. In the process, they were willing to break the law by refusing to report the adult men who were identified as having impregnated them. The reason was simply that they feared reporting the rapes would deter women from coming to them for abortion referrals. Do you see the moral calculus, here? Allowing more rapes helps facilitate more abortions, which helps bring Planned Parenthood more revenue.
*Taking money for targeted abortions of black babies. Later on, another undercover operation showed that a Planned Parenthood employee was willing to take donations under the condition that the money would be specifically set aside for the purpose of aborting black babies. In other words, the organization was willing to set aside money for race-selective abortions.
*Selling body parts. Finally, Planned Parenthood has been caught in the act of selling baby parts for human research. In other words, they are killing babies and selling them under the guise of preserving life. With that kind of twisted logic the president of the organization needed to go to the national media to explain her organization’s actions. And she did by explaining that the real evil was not trafficking in body parts but instead the undercover operations that keep exposing her organization. She explained that undercover stings involve “lying,” which she called the “most disgusting part” of the recent controversy involving the sale of baby parts. According to such logic, the most disgusting part of the Holocaust was when people lied to Nazis to save Jews.
So now I have a very simple question for my friends who keep supporting Planned Parenthood: What would the organization have to do in order to get you to stop supporting them? Would they have to sell the baby parts to fast food chains for human consumption? In other words, is there anything they could possibly do that would awaken your conscience and get you to admit you have been wrong in supporting them?
Every man has a right to defend the indefensible. And I have a right to state the obvious: If you are still defending Planned Parenthood then someone needs to sell you a heart.